Viral Marketing Initiatives

Viral marketing has been effective with several different types of marketing campaigns. “Breaking Bad” is my favorite television show of all time; I was hooked on the show since season one. Therefore, it was exciting to me when the show’s network, AMC, came up with a potent digital marketing formula to promote the show’s final season. It promoted brand awareness while encouraging loyalty and fan engagement. It also incorporated several characteristics of a successful viral marketing campaign including videos, humor, interactivity, social commenting, and social media optimization.

The network combined a variety of techniques to hype up frenzied fans by engaging with them in several creative ways. Fans produced several parodies and tribute videos such as these:

As you can see, humor was also incorporated into some of the videos. A clever app encouraged Breaking Bad addicts to answer questions, share pictures, and quotes from the show through the #bbaddict hashtag. With such a loyal following, the show inspired a lot of quality graphic design and fan art. AMC embraced it as part of their marketing campaign by setting up a Tumblr to promote it while encouraging social commenting. This also encouraged interactivity among fans. A tell-tale sign of a campaign going viral is the number of memes and gifs present on the web.

There are over 26 million Breaking Bad gifs on the internet.

Breaking Bad has over 26 million gifs and 13 million memes dedicated to it (Sellars, 2013.) The viral and fan created content came in every variation on the internet as it also came by way of infographics, character accounts for social media pages, blogs, and microsites created by AMC all helped promote the show while creating a large community for the fans to share their love for the show.

The Clothing on Breaking Bad Is a Clue to Understanding the Characters as shown in this infographic

Breaking Bad’s success has led to a spin-off series called “Better Call Saul.” Fans of the Saul Goodman character will be pleased to know that AMC has already began marketing the prequel, with a real billboard in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Robinson, 2014.) If you use the number listed, you can actually call Saul too. It will be interesting to see what other methods of viral marketing AMC will use for the new series.

A billboard that can currently be seen in Albuquerque, NM.

Since it’s been a while since my last blog post, you may be wondering if a trailer will be featured at the end of the post. Well, there is still a trailer attached to each post. This one looks like another promising film with a moving story heavily focused on music. As a parent, it looks like they’re may be some sad, touching scenes. However, as a Shameless fan, I’m anticipating some crude humor courtesy of first time director William H. Macy. It could also potentially be another music centric film starring Billy Crudup, akin to Almost Famous. Below is a trailer for the upcoming film entitled “Rudderless.”